The Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market gets more crowded every day. How do these Java cloud platforms differ? What are their relative pros and cons?

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Hivtech Jelastic

Jelastic, recently released in beta format, supports the development and hosting of any Java application. Hivtech Technologies, the creators of Jelastic, claim their platform enables developers to upload Java applications in minutes without changes to code or programming language and with no need to write for specific APIs.

Hivtech also claims the platform is the "the world's first cloud platform to host and auto-scale any Java application." Company CEO Ruslan Synytskyy has said Hivtech's mission is "to make it easy to run Java code from the cloud, without locking customers into a single vendor."

Weakness: Its Java-only focus is a turn off for developers who need multi-language support.

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift supports a variety of programming languages and frameworks, including Java EE 6, Ruby, PHP, and Python. Red Hat, the platform's creator, says the technology includes both SQL and NoSQL data stores, and a distributed file system.

There are two versions of OpenShift, Express and Flex. Express is free and multi-tenant, and it supports Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby applications delivered in a shared hosting model. Flex is a hosting environment for Java EE and PHP. Applications can be deployed on middleware components such as JBoss and Tomcat.

Strength: By creating the first Java EE 6 implementation in a PaaS model, OpenShift delivers a simple way for developers to build and deploy Java in the cloud.

Weakness: OpenShift suffers from Red Hat's traditional focus as a systems company, namely its limited history of engagement with developers of higher-level frameworks.